prayer
There is a very old idea hiding underneath a ridiculous amount of modern spiritual language: you do not necessarily pray because God is somewhere else. Sometimes you pray because you are the one who has wandered off. That distinction matters. I have spent years reading religions, myths, philosophy, psychology, ritual texts, and the strange things human beings have done throughout history when they were trying to speak to whatever they believed was larger than themselves. Strip away the costumes, languages, temples, incense, priesthoods, metaphysics, and occasional unfortunate goat, and one pattern appears over and over again. Human beings become scattered. Then they develop a ritual for becoming whole again. This is mine. You can call it God, the divine mind, the higher self, conscience, the soul, the daemon, the spark, the Logos, awareness, or Rock if you absolutely must. The name interests me less than the function. The point is not to convince yourself that you are God in the n...